Bob Dylan: In Defense of His Widely Panned First Book ‘Tarantula’

Experts weigh in on the musician's first book

No one would have thought Bob Dylan would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after his first book, “Tarantula,” hit the scene nearly five decades ago.

Dylan wrote the book, a collection of experimental poetry and prose, in 1966, but it wasn’t published until 1971. The reviews weren’t kind, and the book developed a reputation for being inscrutable and pretentious. Influential rock critic Robert Christgau wrote in the New York Times Book Review at the time: “The official appearance of Bob Dylan’s ‘Tarantula’ is not a literary event, because Dylan is not a literary figure.”

Scribner re-published “Tarantula” in 2004, the year which saw the publication of Dylan’s second book, the much-better-reviewed memoir “Chronicles Vol. 1,” which is considered the gold standard for rock memoirs. Yet now that the songwriter has been ensconced in a Nobel Prize-endorsed literary pantheon alongside the likes of John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison and Pablo Neruda, it might be time for a fresh look at the songwriter’s widely dismissed first foray into printed literature.

“The fact that you are asking this question is evidence that a reexamination is going on right now,” says Mark Spitzer, a writer and professor at the University of Central Arkansas.

Spitzer came to the defense of “Tarantula” in a 2003 essay for Jack magazine. “For the most part, critics and reviewers have always stigmatized Bob Dylan as a lousy poet, advising the public to buy his music instead,” he wrote. “When ‘Tarantula’ was published by Macmillan in 1971, the reaction was predictable, and has been ever since–keeping in league with what is expected from that failed-artist class bent on bashing the bards they secretly aspire to be, but can’t, for lack of imagination.”

The polemic made an impression; Dylan’s official website reprinted Spitzer’s piece in 2011 as “A New Take on ‘Tarantula.’”

Spitzer, reached by email Thursday while traveling in Italy, added to his praise for Dylan’s first book — and his criticism of Dylan’s literary detractors.

“He made fun of ‘the Garbage Clowns’ who didn’t understand that Dylan was actually talking about tasteless philistine voices in the media who respond to hype and gossip and then increase the hype and gossip,” Spitzer said. “The Garbage Clowns, of course, expected Dylan’s poetic voice to be as accessible as his pop lyrics, and they were disappointed that he was challenging his audience, so they panned it.”

Katharine Peddie, a Dylan authority who lectures on writing at the University of Kent in the U.K., pointed to Spin Magazine’s 2003 article “Top Five Unintelligible Sentences Written by Rock Stars,” as an example of the kind of cultural conservatism that aims to keep rock stars in their place while limiting literary experimentation.

“Why can’t we experiment within, or break out from, or refuse the power structures of, the sentence as the unit of meaningful sense?” she said. “If you read ‘Tarantula’ alongside a history of 20th century avant-garde writing, surrealism, Beat writing, Gertrude Stein, investigations of language and the sentence as constructed, rather than natural units of sense, more interesting questions open up.​”